According to the information revealed through the cryptic mailings, the Committee for Sedulous Amalgamation was established five hundred years ago to protect fragments of Nostradamus’ folio. They then funded Adam Brackin’s Time Communication project and charged its members to join the agents of Deus City and collect the missing pieces of the Nostradamus’ work.

Further investigation reveals additional parallels between the two games. An arithmetic symbol used by the Deus City PM, known as “Hank Eggrem,” appears on many tCotSA messages, including its trailhead. tCotSA also makes reference to the death of one of its members, which parallels Alexis Wright Sr’s plane crash in Alabama from the Deus City story.

The impact of this merging of games remains to be seen, as both ARGs have employed very different gameplay styles, with Deus City relying heavily on character interaction while tCoSA utilized “snail mail” to great effect. A similar merger of ongoing games happened in the past with Wildfire Industries and Synagoga. Watching these two communities interact will be an interesting study in merging gaming cultures, whether the games merge completely or continue running concurrent plotlines.

DeusCity resources:Click Here for the Deus City websiteClick Here for the unfiction forum threadClick Here for the Deus City wikiThe Committee of the Sedulous AmalgamationClick Here for the tCotSA unfiction forum threadClick Here for the tCotSA story so far

In a world where technology allows immediate communication between people on opposite sides of the planet, and the internet provides instant access to new entertainment and information generated daily by multitudes of contributors of both the professional and the amateur varieties, it’s easy to forget the value of older, slower forms of communication such as snailmail. Perhaps this is the reason for the growing popularity of the slow foods movement, which offers a sumptuous alternative to the culinary portion of our increasingly-fast paced lives in which the time invested is itself part of the reward, and for which handmade quality trumps convenience.

The ARG world seems to have gotten its own equivalent to that movement in the form of The Committee for the Sedulous Amalgamation, which offers its players a veritable banquet of the type of pleasures that just can’t be replicated digitally: the thrill of tearing open an envelope to find a mysterious snailmail letter, the enjoyment of physically handling a beautifully constructed puzzle, and the satisfaction of possessing swag that you’ll keep long after the game has ended. The game launched with a letter sent to Unfiction, inviting players to thirteen Challenges and exhorting them to “make humanity proud!”